• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Avaya drops Microsoft with IP Office 6.1 update

Communication platform switches to Linux

Desktop

• Open Source Desktops May Not Happen for Small Biz

  For all the talk of how open source software is kicking butt and taking names in the cloud space (see: Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell) and in embedded space (see Android, MeeGo), there’s one area where open source has consistently fallen woefully short: providing solutions for small businesses.

  This is a weird sort of failure, too, because on the surface it seems like open source software products–with their collective low price tag, solid support, and better security–would be a perfect fit for the needs of smaller businesses, which often need superlative computing capabilities but can only afford the least-expensive hardware and software due to budget constraints.

Server

• Marvell spins quad-core ARM SoC for servers

  Marvell says it is now sampling a quad-core, ARM-based processor aimed at “enterprise class cloud computing.” The Armada XP runs at 1.6Hz, has a 2MB second-level cache, supports 64-bit DDR3 memory, includes four gigabit Ethernet ports and other interfaces, and uses fewer than ten Watts, according to the company.

Audiocasts/Shows

• LB – Episode 63 – Just Us, Just News

• My first podcast – Switching from CentOS to Slackware

  This is my first podcast, and it is more an experiment than a real podcast with new content.

  I am thinking about making some podcasts, let’s say one per month, but I would like to hear “read” your feedback, so this is somehow a test drive.

Ballnux

• Samsung Galaxy Tab now available on T-Mobile

  Samsung’s seven-inch, Android 2.2 Galaxy Tab tablet is now available on T-Mobile for $399 with a two-year plan or $599 without, says the carrier. Meanwhile, a 10.1-inch Samsung tablet has been spotted at a Chinese trade show.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Automotive Infotainment Development Company Pelagicore Joins Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Pelagicore is its newest member. Pelagicore develops products and technologies that serve the growing demand for open source infotainment systems from the automotive industry. The company is joining The Linux Foundation to collaborate specifically on MeeGo and its In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference design.

Applications

• Easy graphical BURG boot-loader tool ‘BURG Manager’ has been updated to version 1.0.

  Burg manager app updated with new themes, new features

• Release of KGraphViewer, version 2.1.1

  Release of KGraphViewer, version 2.1.1. This is a bugfix only release that makes the kgraphviewer library cleaner: all necessary headers (and only them) are installed with a proper d-pointer in its sole exported class.

• VLC v1.1.5 released

  VideoLAN have released an update to their popular media player. This is a minor update mainly containing bug fixes from v1.1.4 and a few new features. Support has been added for RTP access for H264 streams. Multiple language translations has also been updated within VLC, a new Austrian has also been added. You can find the full changelog below.

• 5 Best Free Linux / Ubuntu Firewalls

  Linux OS is actually considered as a robust platform. It is not easily attacked by virus and other unwanted Internet junk. Yet it is better to keep your system protected as a wiseman said, “Prevention is better than cure”. So, this would make you protect your Linux / Ubuntu system, so we compile a list of 5 best free Ubuntu / Linux firewalls.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Mint 10 manual disk partitioning guide

  • x2vnc allows the console (keyboard and mouse) on an X terminal to be used to control another console running a VNC server.

  • FlBurn – Optical disc burning software for Linux

  • The Perfect Server – Fedora 14 x86_64 [ISPConfig 2]

• Wine

  • Test-driving Bordeaux 2.0.8

    I’ve been using Bordeaux for about a week now and, though it has some rough edges, I’m enjoying the experience. Once I got the hang of the suite’s little quirks, I found it to be powerful and it makes working with Windows software on PC-BSD a more pleasant experience. Having a list of supported software takes some of the guesswork out of running applications on Wine. Having separate cellars is also nice in that it gets around the problem of different programs having special (or conflicting) dependencies. Right now the software feels like it’s aimed at system administrators who want to install and manage multiple Windows applications. Bordeaux is not quite to the point where I would suggest it for end-users, but with a few more progress bars, tool tips and (especially) documentation it can easily get there. The functionality is in place and just needs some friendly touches. This is definitely a product to keep in mind if you’re trying to transition between the Windows world and the Linux/BSD community.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Attends Relaunched SoLiSC Event in Brazil

    KDE recently attended SoLiSC (website in Portuguese), a local free software meeting based in Florianópolis, Brazil. SoLiSC had been inactive since 2005, but in 2009 the Free Software Association of Santa Catarina (Associação Software Livre Santa Catarina) was created to revive it and succeeded in doing so in October this year. The aim of the Association is to create a permanent forum for the discussion of free software in the state of Santa Catarina.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Quick and easy printer sharing in GNOME

    Printer sharing was once a big challenge for Linux. It almost always involved manually configuring Samba to share out your printers. That is not so now. With the latest releases of the GNOME desktop, printer sharing is as easy as it is in any other operating system. So longer will you need to open up that /etc/smb.conf file and spend hours or days trying to figure out the challenging configuration. Now it’s point and click.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • “Welcome to Tiny Core Linux [...] The latest version: 3.2″

  • Clonezilla 1.2.6-38

  • RIPLinuX 11.1

  • Release Notes for Alpine 2.1.2

  • xPUD 0.9.5

  • AUSTRUMI 2.2.1

  • Saturday, 30 October 2010 20:46

    Parted Magic 5.7 includes the new 0.7.0 version of GParted and some major changes to networking. Wicd is now used as the default networking manager and Gnome PPP for dial-up connections. The old Start Network program is still in the panel menu if you want to use it. The vncviewer was switched to Real VNC Viewer. A DBAN clone called nwipe was added for more advanced disk wiping.

  • 4 November 2010 – New Cooking 20101104

    The SliTaz team is pleased to announce the release of a new cooking ISO featuring over 2600 packages. It contains Linux Kernel 2.6.34 and was rebuilt with a new toolchain using glibc 2.11.2 and gcc 4.5.1. Xorg has been fully updated to 1.9.2. The LiveCD includes Midori, the Deadbeef audio player, and many more applications. Tazpkg and Tazctrlbox now support gettext translations and more UTF locales have been added. Many bugfixes, updates and improvements can also be found. A lot of work has been done during these past 6 months.

  • GParted 0.7.0-3

  • Greenie 8M

  • ImagineOS 20101103

  • Devil-Linux 1.4 released

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Ubuntu vs Fedora: which is best?

      So, who is right? Maybe they both are. It’s completely understandable that, for example, some Debian contributor feels that Ubuntu is in some way getting credit for their work. It is also true that, before Ubuntu, Linux was perceived as difficult to use and unsuitable for anyone but the most hardened geek.

      Ultimately, all the open source projects and people that work in or around them make contributions to Linux, and because all the Linux distros are part of a shared community, they all contribute too. Which one you choose is really down to what you want to use Linux for.

      What is certain is that there is a lot to discover in virtually every different flavour of Linux, so be adventurous – don’t just install one and stick with it. With virtual machine technology and a huge range of live distributions, it’s easier than ever to take a new version of Linux for a spin.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Squeeze beta- a first look

    OK, this is still a beta, so any nits found here may be fixed before release, but these are my first impressions of Debian Squeeze Beta.

    [...]

    Overall impression: Good. There’s far less messing around required to get things working than was the case with Lenny. Applications are up to date and work as expected. With any luck the bugs I noticed will get fixed before release.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Speed Limit: 75MPH. Ubuntu: 110MPH.

      In recent days, it was announced that Ubuntu is going to make the switch to using Wayland as a replacement for X as a windowing system and Unity for the desktop environment. I dislike both of these changes for one specific reason: Both codebases for both projects are too new.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 for the O2 Joggler

      I’ve been trying a new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) image out on my O2 Joggler this week and it is a big improvement over the 9.04 images I’ve been using previously and everything works out of the box without any fiddling.

    • Ubuntu’s Great Graphical Gambit: X Won’t Mark the Spot

      Reaction in the Linux community to news that Ubuntu will be getting a new graphics system — replacing X.org with Wayland — has been mixed, but the worriers seem seriously worried. “I really think they may have gone too far with this change,” Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger opined. “There are still plenty of ways to get better speed out of the existing system without a wholesale change like this.”

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 10 New Menu Features

        The Linux Mint main menu has received even more changes in the recent release of Linux Mint 10. Users can now see new menu items highlighted, search for and install software, and search the web from inside of the menu. The main menu also supports GTK bookmarks and its own GTK theme independent from the rest of the desktop.

      • More Thoughts On Fedora 14

        In the most recent episode of the Acrossad GNU/Linux Oggcast, I stated that I was going to try Fedora 14 on a new laptop. I recently got my chance. I was able to test out Fedora 14 on a borrowed Toshiba Satellite L675 laptop.Fedora performed very nicely indeed. The built-in wifi does not work because Linux drivers for the installed Realtek wifi radio card do not yet exist.

      • Linux Mint 10 gains new theme, menu system

        The Linux Mint team released the final Linux Mint 10 (“Julia”), based on Ubuntu 10.10. the popular desktop Linux distribution adds one-click upgrades to the DVD edition, as well as a new Mint-X theme, performance improvements, improved software and update managers, GTK support, and revised menus that highlight new apps.

      • A newly minted Linux a must for the desktop

        One reader commented that Linux already has a higher install base than Mac OS X.

        While that might be true (with Linux being free to distribute it’s always going to be impossible to know exactly), it doesn’t mean Linux is living up to its full potential on the desktop.

        My argument is not that Linux distributions should try to be like Windows or Mac OS X, my argument is they should care more about the end-user experience. And shipping stable, integrated software is key to that.

        Windows and Mac OS X both appeal to non-technical people because a lot of administration tasks are either automated or only involve pointing and clicking.

        Of course, that doesn’t mean Linux is difficult to use. But the lack of integration can be off-putting for someone who has never used it before.

        In fact, there’s absolutely no reason why a free operating system can’t exceed the user experience of a commercial one.

      • Linux Mint 10 (Julia), First Impressions

        Probably the most difficult thing a user is going to run into with Linux Mint 10 (Julia) at this point is simply downloading it. Demand for the new release has obviously been far greater than anything they have seen before, and their servers have not been able to keep up with the load. As of this morning, Monday 15/11/2010 at 9:00 Swiss time, getting a response from their main web page is still inconsistent, so if you know of a mirror nearby, you would be well advised to go directly to it.

Devices/Embedded

• Automotive infotainment middleware debuts

  Jungo Ltd. announced a Linux-ready middleware stack for automotive infotainment applications. The Automotive Connectivity Middleware offers a complete media and networking infrastructure, including wireless connectivity, phone management, and integration with mapping and telematics functionality, says the company.

• Linux development board and BSP ships for multicore MIPS SoC

  NetLogic Microsystems has released a Linux development kit and board support package (BSP) for its MIPS-based eight-core XLP system-on-chip (SoC). The XLP Multi-Core Processor Development Kit includes a development board, software tools, libraries, drivers, and reference solutions, says the chipmaker.

• 3U cPCI board offers I/O expansion option

  The SBCs also offer identical ruggedization levels and operating system support. The latter includes board support packages (BSPs) for Linux, VxWorks, QNX Neutrino, and Integrity. Windows drivers are also available, says the company.

• Linux/Android HMI kit upgrades to 1GHz Cortex-A8 SoC

  TES Electronic Solutions announced a new member of its Linux- and Android-ready “Magik” computer-on-module (COM) and HMI development kit family, this time with TI’s DaVinci DM3730 system-on-chip. The Magik-MX-37 COM has 512MB RAM and up to 1GB of flash storage, and the compete kit offers a seven-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen plus I/O including Ethernet, USB, and HDMI.

• Music production tablet runs MeeGo on an Intel Atom

  Trinity Audio Group demonstrated a prototype of a tablet running a MeeGo-based version 5.0 of its Transmission audio platform for musicians. Now open for beta testing, the Indamixx 2 tablet runs on an Intel Atom processor with 2GB of RAM, and offers a multitouch display, 160GB of storage, and the Renoise tracking and sampling application.

• Android tablets touted for advanced audio

  Creative Technology announced 10-inch and seven-inch tablet computers along with a 3.2-inch portable media player (PMP) — all offering Android 2.1, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and “Pure Wireless Entertainment” branding. The Creative Ziio 10″ and Ziio 7″ each offer Creative’s 1GHz, Cortex-A8-based ZMS-08 processor, while the Zen Touch 2 Wireless Entertainment Device features a two-megapixel camera.

• Eight-core DSP claimed to be fastest ever

  With TI’s recent Linux port to the C64x DSPs, system designers developing signal-intensive equipment can take full advantage of the DSP cores directly with Linux, without requiring a SoC that also includes an ARM core. These would include the recently announced TMS320DM8168 as well as many other TI OMAP, Sitara, and DaVinci SoCs such as the DaVinci DM3730.

  Presumably, similar streamlined access to Linux developers is being provided for the C66x family as well. TI has recently been making a major push to open up its DSP architectures to ARM Linux developers. These efforts include the release of two free Linux development tools to ease programming of the TMS320C6000 DSP. The C6EZRun tool partitions code between the DSP and ARM cores, while C6EZAccel offers an ARM-side API library of over 130 optimized DSP kernels.

• QorIQ SoC offers FlexCAN controllers, runs on 1.1 Watts

  A P1010RDB reference design board incorporating the P1010 is planned for availability in Q1 2011, says Freescale. The company did not list OS support, but previous QorIQ SoCs have been supported with Linux support packages.

  The new QorIQ parts will also be supported by Enea, Green Hills Software, Mentor Graphics, and Wind River, all of which offered testimonial quotes. Mentor Graphics and Wind River specifically mentioned Linux support.

  Stated Brett Butler, general manager and vice president of Freescale’s Networking Processor Division, “The P1010 is the newest member of the broad QorIQ product family, which scales from single-core offerings at 500MHz to multicore processors that deliver 2GHz.”

• E Ink launches displays for color e-readers

  Electrophorescent (EPD) displays sourced from E Ink have been used in the majority of e-readers to date. Examples include Amazon’s market-leading, Linux-based Kindle — reecently updated to become smaller and lighter.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Review: G2 soars with HSPA+ network and Android 2.2

      T-Mobile’s HTC-manufactured G2 smartphone was reviewed by eWEEK and found to offer blazing speed using T-Mobile’s 4G-like HSPA+ network. A strong feature set, Android 2.2, and reliable operation more than overcome a few flaws, Wayne Rash writes.

    • Android jumps to 44 percent U.S. smartphone share

    • Samsung leads global smartphone growth, says IDC

    • Samsung Continuum phone features secondary ticker display

• Tablets

  • $150 Android tablet focuses on e-reader apps

    PocketBook USA has launched both a $150 color e-reader tablet based on Android 2.0 and a $180, Linux-based monochrome e-reader tablet. The PocketBook IQ is a seven-inch, 800 x 600 tablet with Wi-Fi and 2GB of memory, while the PocketBook Pro 602 is a six-inch E Ink e-reader with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, says the company.

Apache knights at round tables

Into this world comes Apache. They are programmers, they have jobs, but within Apache they also have a moral code, a sense of belonging, a common purpose, and important work that feeds the common good. They spin what in our time looks like wealth, then give it away free to anyone who wants it.

The Enterprise’s Open Storage Quandary

Further, open source storage solutions are becoming more sophisticated as third-party add-ons that offer high-end features evolve. For example, OpendedUp, an open source deduplication file system for Linux that’s also known as “SDFS,” emerged in March. This is designed for enterprises with virtual environments looking for a high-performance, scalable deduplication system that’s not too costly.

SaaS

• DimDim’s Acquisition Would Pitch Another FOSS Leader Into Proprietary Hands

  As Canonical COO Matt Asay notes on The Register, and as VCCircle has noted, there are strong signs that Salesforce.com is close to acquiring open source web conferencing company DImDim. Salesforce has been on a tear, with its stock hitting stratospheric heights, and is one of the primary companies illustrating how much promise the cloud holds for business technology users. It’s certainly believable that Salesforce might like to acquire DimDim, but do we want to see another celebrated open source-focused company swallowed up by a proprietary one?

Databases

• Can Firebird gain against MySQL?

  MySQL is now really an Oracle product, price included. Which is a big chance for all other “really free” database servers, like Firebird and PostgreSQL.

CMS

• Drupal 7.0 Beta 3 released

  Today marks reaching Drupal 7′s 0 critical bug milestone! We’ve rolled one final beta release to shake out any last minute problems and fix strings.

BSD

• 2.8.2 Released, 30-Oct-2010!

  The DragonFly 2.8.2 release is now available! A great deal of stability and MP-related work has gone into this release relative to 2.6, as well as many new features, pkgsrc-2010Q3, and the return of the GUI release image for 4G USB sticks.

• OpenBSD 4.8

  The current release is OpenBSD 4.8 which was released November 1, 2010.

• PC-BSD 9.0-snapshot

• FreeNAS 0.7.2

  2010-11-06: Security Alert, all users need to upgrade their FreeNAS to the latest stable (0.7.2.5543). If you can’t upgrade: Restrict WebGUI access from trusted IP addresses. Thanks to Brian Adeloye from Tenable Network Security for reporting this vulnerability.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Boss Complains About ‘Only’ Making $9 Million — If Only We Had Problems Like That

  I’ve seen some truly amazing feats of magic, but here’s one that beats them all. Right before your eyes, this thing rises into the air on its own, with no wires or mechanical devices giving it lift. And it hovers there effortlessly.

• Would Henry I Have Castrated Goldman Sachs?

  2. Money doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it at some point. An old workmate of mine used to have a colorful turn of phrase to describe the possession of something that is ostensibly praiseworthy but practically useless: “That’s like tits on a boar hog.” Economists have a more formal way to discuss the extent to which nominal money may actually be like “tits on a boar hog”: The Velocity of Money. The Velocity of Money is a measure of just how often a particular dollar gets spent during the year, and the more often the better.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • India The Latest To Think About Kicking People Off The Internet Based On Accusations Of File Sharing

    A few months back, we pointed to a discussion looking at how three countries with some of the biggest movie industries outside of the US — Nigeria, China and India — all were thriving, despite massive “piracy.” As you looked at the details of each, it showed how each industry had been adapting to a marketplace in which some of the content was widely available, but were still figuring out ways to make money (i.e., you can compete with free). However, because competing with free actually involves work, it should come as no surprise that some are seeking to implement government protectionist policies.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

FUD^2

FUD just will not go away. People must be paid to manufacture it. I will not post a link to the latest FUD article I read but it has a bunch of points:

* GNU/Linux is faster and has more drivers out of the box
* GNU/Linux is faster to install and brings more apps to the table

which sounds great. GNU/Linux is a winner… Then TFA goes on to recount that

* GNU/Linux lacks “special drivers” for “special devices”, the Achilles’ Heel and
* GNU/Linux crashes a lot, especially when tweaking it

Logic and Reason

Another piece of FUD caught my eye: “Linux vs. Windows: Suspending logic and reason for blind faith“. The authour, Donovan Colbert, expresses outrage/amazement at the unreasoning adherents of operating systems in the security debate. He compares the “many eyes” of FLOSS versus the “security through obscurity” of non-free software. This is an old story but he dredges it up anyway.

His argument is that the many eyes feature is also a vulnerability since the bad guys can also see the code, not just the good guys. This is nonsense.

[...]

So stuff from 1995 in X applications crashed 24% of the time in fuzz-testing but 100% of GUI apps in Lose 2000 crashed. Does being closed make you more secure? Nope.

Kinect Hacker Hector Shows Redmond Who’s Daddy

The events of this week reminded me why I love GNU, Linux, and free software so much. We leverage the power of communities of independent people better than any organization on the planet. It is simply a fact that gets proven over and over again. Discussions over the last several months have revolved around several interesting GNU/Linux and free software facts:

* If GNU/Linux were created solely by paid developers, it would have cost over 1 BILLION dollars to develop using conventional proprietary means. 1.
* Open source and free software are saving a lot of people in the real world a substantial amount of money, including government agencies. 2.

Sometimes We Grow Up

It was no surprise when Jono’s announcement of the OpenRespect project was met with the usual mix of positive and negative responses.

[...]

Maybe Jono is a hypocrite who wants it all ways. I don’t think so, but so what if he is? We’re all imperfect, we all have pasts full of mistakes, and if all we do is focus a critical, judgmental lens on everything we’ll never accomplish anything. I think a reasonable baseline is to expect everyone to try, even a little, to get along with their fellow humans.

Rant: Linux Wars

And each year one “Linux” becomes more different than the next “Linux”. Some want compatibility and standards based development (even if it’s lousy at times). Others want “OMG, not some lame standard, pah! we’re the best! just do it!” and for Linux to do its own thing entirely. Neither approach is entirely correct, nor entirely wrong. But we’re not learning from UNIX either.

Desktop

• GNU/Linux on the Desktop in India

  It’s estimated that this year in India OEMs will ship close to 4,00,000 desktops with a Linux subscription or with preloaded Linux.

• Help Find out the Real Desktop Linux Market Share

  The same page also features a break down of the figures with some really interesting stats. Ubuntu as usual, has a whooping 61% of the figures tallied so far, with Poland having a staggering 26% of the boxes?

Server

• China Officially Overtakes U.S. in Supercomputer Performance

  It’s been rumored, but now it’s official. The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has achieved a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). This puts it in the number one spot on the 36th edition of the TOP500′s world’s most powerful supercomputer list, the organization said Sunday.

  As a result, the prior winner on the list—the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee—is now ranked in second place, with a score of 1.75 petaflop/s.

Ballnux

• Nexus Two aka Nexus S, Images-Details Leaked

  It’s about time Nexus One gets its successor. Engadget has been fueling rumors about the next Nexus phone; it’s not HTC. Two Samsung phones are believed to be the next Nexus phones.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Going down the programmable pipeline road

    As you might know OpenGL comes in two flavors: fixed functionality and programmable pipeline. With the fixed functionality you have to use API calls to influence the execution of each stage of the rendering pipeline. It is a very powerful API allowing you to do most of the stuff we use in KWin. The programmable pipeline allows to directly execute code (called a “Shader”) to do vertex and fragment processing. For example we are able to saturate a complete window as a whole with fixed functionality, but we need a fragment shader to be able to change the color of each pixel depending on the input color. This is for example used in the invert effect. A vertex shader can be used to influence the geometry. E.g. we could use it to transform a cube into a sphere. OpenGL 1.x is completely fixed functionality, in OpenGL 2 the programmable pipeline was introduced to exchange parts of the rendering stack, but fixed functionality was still around. With OpenGL 3 everyone expected the fixed functionality to be removed, but it was only deprecated and you can still use it. All the modern calls have been moved into a “core profile”.

Applications

• DeadBeef – Simple, Lightweight Music Player for Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid

  DeadBeef is probably the simplest and the most lightweight music player I have ever used in my Ubuntu. If you are someone who loves to keep it simple and useful at the same time, DeadBeef is one music player you definitely don’t want to miss.

• Installing and using SNORT on Ubuntu

  Snort can be created as a program that you run when you want on a personal computer or it can be setup to run when your OS starts and protect all computers on your network from attacks.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • [VIDEO] How to Create a Logo in GIMP

  • Detecting Memory Leaks in Kernel & Managed code OSes

  • Joomla! 1.5: Installing, Creating, and Managing Modules

  • Network file systems and Linux

  • Preventing Brute Force Attacks With BlockHosts On Debian Lenny

  • Putting your Ubuntu desktop in the cloud

  • How to Install VirtualBox 3.2.10 in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid

• Games

  • Brutal Chess – 3D Chess Game

    Brutal Chess features full 3D graphics, an advanced particle engine, and several different levels of intelligent AI, inspired by the once popular “Battle Chess” released by Interplay circa 1988.

    Beat the CPU if you can or just enjoy some of the best looking chess pieces on the internet – enjoy the view, engage your mind and checkmate!

  • Death Rally – Death in the Fast Line

    In late 1996 this top-down racing game took all by surprise with it’s addictive nature and excellent gameplay.

    The basic idea behind Death Rally: win races, gather more money, buy upgrades to your vehicle. In between wreck your opponents, shoot your way through bystanders and keep the pedal to the metal!

  • Preview: Upcoming Linux Game ‘ The Real Texas’

    The Real Texas is an upcoming adventure game which will be available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The game looks quite interesting with some features that makes it different though it is an old school top down adventure at heart. (videos below)

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Pinguy E-17 remix

    This build is a livedvd showcasing the newly beta EFL libraries for the E-17 window manager. It was built on the 10.04 Ubuntu core and follows PinguyOS, in being a working out of the box operating system.

  • Review: GNU/Linux Utopia 12112010 (Idea by Manuel)

    …GNU IceCat, Liferea, and Seamonkey. IceCat is a rebranded version of Mozilla Firefox, similar to Iceweasel. I was happy to see that most codecs are included out-of-the-box.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 Beta Available for Download

    Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced on November 9th the immediate availability of the first beta version of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 operating system.

  • 3 Triangle titans, $3 billion: How will they deploy it all?

    Cree, Red Hat and SAS, three of the Triangle’s most successful home-grown technology companies, are members of an exclusive club.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora, like Ubuntu, to dump X for Wayland

      Fedora, Red Hat’s community distribution, has also decided to start to move to Wayland too.

      [...]

      Personally, I don’t see any Linux distribution using Wayland as its default graphical interface until well into 2012. I also think it’s possible that a cleaned-up and revised X server may yet keep X as Linux’s dominant graphical interface. For now, though, Wayland’s star is in the ascendent and the venerable X Window’s star is descending.

    • I’m running the latest Fedora 13 kernel, 2.6.34.7-61, and I have ATI video and Conexant sound playing nicely

      I’ve been sitting on old kernels for too long in Fedora 13. First I kept 2.6.33.8-149 because I could use the open-source ati video driver, but then I moved to 2.6.34.7-56, where I had working and speedy video with the fglrx driver direct from ATI/AMD as well as the ability to mute the speakers fed by my Lenovo G555′s Conexant 5069 sound chip.

• Debian Family

  • SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Goes Alpha

    The first Alpha of SimplyMEPIS 11.0 has been released and uploaded to the MEPIS master site. If you are an MEPIS subscriber you can download the file immediately. The global ISO mirrors should make the files available to the general public within 24 hours.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Get New Radio Tray Mono Icons For Ubuntu

      Eriq Jaffe has uploaded a new set of Radio Tray Mono Icons on Gnome Looks. The icons add more style and polish to your Radio Tray.

    • No unity in Ubuntu’s decision

      In a post on her blog Story Peters, executive director of the Gnome Foundation, says as much:

      “We’ve put a lot of work into Gnome Shell, our next big thing, and Canonical is saying that it’s not the best thing for their users. It’s disappointing because we are excited about our new plans and expect lots of users to enjoy them. And we rely on our distribution partners to get Gnome into the hands of users, so we were expecting Canonical to help us in that.”

      Disappointment aside there are a couple of potentially good reasons for Canonical to switch to Unity.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Distro Hoppin`: Dream Studio 10.10

        If you are dreaming of a free software suite to run your studio, then stop dreaming and download a copy of this distro and install it on your machine and be happy, your dream has finally come true.

      • Warning, server downtime, switch your repositories

        The German datacenter we’re using is moving to France and this impacts two of our dedicated servers:

        * The www.linuxmint.com website
        * The packages.linuxmint.com repositories

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo 1.1 SDK Beta Released!

      Intel, Nokia lead MeeGo project has announced the release of MeeGo 1.1 SDK Beta. MeeGo 1.1 SDK release enables application developers to develop, install, and debug applications, as well as run applications on N900, Netbook, and Aava devices with MeeGo.

  • Android

    • Android Powered Motorola CITRUS Only For $49

      Motorola CITRUS is now available in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.com tomorrow for $49.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.

• Sub-notebooks

  • JoliBook May Beat Chrome OS As The First Cloud-Linux Netbook

    Jolicloud is set to launch its own netbook preloaded with Jolicloud. The launch would beat Google Chrome which is expected to be launched soon. JoliBook seems to follow Apple’s strategy of bundling hardware and software.

  • Jolibook: The Jolicloud Powered Netbook

    Today we’ve received in our mailbox a black envelope from Jolicloud, announcing the powerful and amazing Jolibook netbook device!

    This month, according to the Jolicloud developers, something big is going to happen in the world of little computers. Jolibook, will be a netbook device powered by the Jolicloud 1.1 operating system, it will have a next-generation N550 CPU, a 250GB hard disk, and a LED LCD monitor.

The Great Blender Survey Results: The News Behind The News

So getting back to the Great Blender Survey, scrolling to the end, what’s the first action plan proposed by the survey-taker? They hold up their Don-Norman-blessed edition of Don’t Make Me Think and start chattering about changing the interface on the website, as if the whole survey just went through them like chili through a cat.

Chamba Swathanthra Cinema – India’s First Open Movie Project Slowly Coming Alive

It seems Blender open movies have inspired quite a number of people. Chamba Swathanthra Cinema is an open movie project by a bunch of free software enthusiasts from Kerala, India. Chamba Swathanthra Cinema is probably first of its kind open movie project ever initiated by anyone other than Blender foundation.

What can all managers learn from Free, Open Source Software?

The 2010 edition of the Free/Open Source Software in Academia Conference (fOSSa) was an interesting event, (here’s my final report about fOSSa2010). In this page I intend to present something I found in common among several fOSSa talks. Something that is relevant for everybody who cares about effective business and human resources management in any sector, not just in the software industry.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 Beta 8 Scheduled, Beta 7 GPU Acceleration Detailed

    Firefox 4 Beta 7 was a big release for Mozilla, but Beta 8 is already scheduled for release at the end of the month. The company also detailed improvements to its hardware acceleration engine for Windows XP – 7, as well as changes to HTML 5 support.

Programming

• Oracle comments on JVM strategy

  Oracle‘s Java ambassador Henrik Ståhl has reacted to reports from various media outlets about a dual license for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) based on a merger of the JRockit and HotSpot virtual machines. As presented at JavaOne in September, this “united” JVM is to consist of the best features of the two JVMs. The result is to be incrementally implemented in OpenJDK, although a number of components – such as Sun’s Java for Business and Oracle’s JRockit Mission Control, JRockit Real Time and JRockit Virtual Edition – will continue to be sold as proprietary, commercial premium extensions.

• Launching code.mozy.com

  Since my start at Mozy in September, 2009, one of the internal programs in which I quickly took interest was Mozy Labs. Labs’ main champion was a former Google intern named JT Olds, who had witnessed directly the power of allowing engineers free time for innovation and wanted that for Mozy.

Standards/Consortia

• When and How to Launch a Standards Consortium

  In this article, I will review the situations where a new consortium should and — as importantly — should not, be formed. I will also provide a decision tree for determining what activities a new consortium should undertake to increase the likelihood of its success, a description of the infrastructural elements needed to support these activities, and an indication of the stage of an organization’s maturity at which the addition of each activity becomes advisable.

Natural History Museum expedition ‘poses genocide threat’ to Paraguay tribes

Anthropologists and indigenous leaders have warned that a Natural History Museum expedition to Paraguay could lead to “genocide” and are calling for it to be abandoned. They fear that the scientists and their teams of assistants are likely to make accidental contact with isolated indigenous groups in the remote region they are planning to visit and could pass on infectious diseases.

Is Facebook A Threat To The Free & Open Web?

Google has refused Facebook to automatically ‘import’ Gmail data from a user’s account by changing its terms of service. I see it as Google standing up to fight an abusive, monopolistic forces rising in the Internet world.

Has Google Become Too Stagnant?

The last time Google released something really groundbreaking was Gmail, if I remember right. Of course since then, they’ve cobbled up other small companies to add their own midas touch to make those companies hugely successful Google products, Youtube readily comes to mind here. However, even that strategy does not look to have worked for Mountain View this year given the 23 or so acquisitions.

Health/Nutrition

• San Francisco Moving Toward Ban Of Toys From Most McDonald’s Happy Meals

  In an 8-3 vote, the board passed a preliminary version of a new rule that forbids toy freebies with meals that don’t meet minimum nutritional standards.

• Despite 2006 “Pledge,” Fast Food Companies Target Kids More Than Ever

  In response to growing pressure about promoting unhealthy food to kids and contributing to the obesity epidemic, the fast food industry did what every industry that produces a harmful product does: it pledged to voluntarily end the harmful practices that started drawing scrutiny to the industry. Accordingly, in 2006 the Council of Better Business Bureaus launched its Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a voluntary code of conduct under which fast food purveyors pledged to promote healthier food choices in their advertising, and to use messages encouraging good nutrition in ads aimed at kids.

• Why I Will Stay Far Away From Cliffs From Now on

  I set fire to a lot of bridges when I accepted Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s invitation to testify as part of his investigation into health insurance company practices that for years have been swelling the ranks of the uninsured and the underinsured in the United States. With the publication of my book — the subtitle of which is, “An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out On How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans” — I am torching a few more.

  I describe in the book how a huge share of Americans’ health-care premiums bankrolls relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts focused on protecting one thing: profits. I also describe how the industry’s PR onslaught drastically weakened health-care reform and how it plays an insidious and often invisible role in our political process anywhere that corporate profits are at stake, from climate change to defense policy.

  They’re going to kill you, Wendell,” a former CIGNA colleague warned in an email after reading a couple of chapters this morning. “If I were you, I wouldn’t get anywhere near a cliff.”

• Potter’s “Deadly Spin” Exposes Damaging Insurance Industry PR Activities

  In his new book, former insurance industry insider Wendell Potter says insurance companies spend a huge portion of Americans’ health insurance premiums on relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts that are focused on one thing: profits. He describes how the insurance industry’s PR onslaught drastically weakened the new health reform law, and how it plays an insidious but often invisible role in politics any time corporate profits are threatened, on subjects ranging from climate change to defense policy.

• FDA to Require New, Graphic Cigarette Health Warning Labels

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has unveiled hard-hitting, graphic new cigarette warning labels that will be required on cigarette packs after October 22, 2012. The labels show corpses, a man smoking through a tracheostomy, pictures of diseased lungs, a bedridden man suffering from end-stage cancer, rotten teeth, a man in the throes of a heart attack, a woman blowing smoke in a baby’s face and similar depictions meant to show the actual physical effects of smoking.

• U.S. Cigarette Warning Labels Are About to Get Graphic

  Cigarette packages currently come with a tidy black-bordered warning label, reminding users that smoking causes lung cancer, birth defects and heart disease. Dutiful, yes, and easily disregarded. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled 36 proposed new warning labels designed to grab smokers’ attention. The new labels will cover half of a cigarette pack with graphic warnings — think dead bodies and cancer-ridden lungs — about the risks of smoking.

• Natural Gas and Money, a “Bacteria that Ills the American System”

  Things aren’t looking good on the most important issue of them all: environmental justice, or, in more stark terms, the future of the world as we know it.

• Market Watch: Farmers market cheating alleged

  The largest operator of Southern California farmers markets has protected a vendor who buys produce wholesale and misrepresents it as his own, alleged one of the company’s managers, who made the claim at a listening session held by the California Department of Food and Agriculture last week in Santa Monica. The operator has denied the allegation, but the repercussions seem likely to reverberate in the farmers market world.

• What the FDA doesn’t want you to know about GE salmon

  One of the arguments against expanding the FDA’s powers over food safety is that the agency has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to enforce existing laws and to regulate aggressively in the face of corporate lobbying.

  Unfortunately, we now have more evidence that the FDA may indeed be a bad-faith regulator.

  The Center for Food Safety has unearthed convincing evidence that the FDA is attempting to freeze out marine and fisheries experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its rush to approve biotech company AquaBounty’s genetically modified salmon for human consumption.

Security

• Explaining Security Concepts to ZDNet Bloggers Is Like Teaching Physics to a Pig

  Once a proprietary software hole is found, it stays open for years. We’ve literally seen the case happen, here’s the 17-year-old Windows hole that just got patched this year. (…and the Register still says ‘hacker’ when they mean ‘cracker.’ See what we’re up against?)

  Conversely, the same strategy doesn’t work against Linux, BSD, and other open source systems. Yes, true, you can penetration-test Linux and BSD. There’s plenty of tools out there to do that, too. There’s even distros like “Damn Vulnerable Linux” specifically built to be weak and demonstrate points of failure. But when you go to all that trouble to find a security hole in Linux and exploit it, you know what’s going to happen?

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Omar Khadr Jury Hammers the Final Nail into the Coffin of American Justice

  On Sunday, a military jury at Guantánamo handed down a 40-year sentence to Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan. The decision brought to an end a week of hearings that began when Khadr, now 24, accepted a plea deal giving him an eight-year sentence in exchange for agreeing that he was guilty of murder in violation of the laws of war, spying, conspiracy, providing material support to terrorism, and attempted murder, with one year to be served in Guantánamo, and the remaining seven in Canada.

• Abuse claims lift cloak of secrecy over Britain’s Iraq interrogation base

• The many faces of an Iranian Cindy Sherman

  Tara Inanloo has taken a series of self-portraits ‘to represent the different Iranian women inside myself’. Now she is in grave danger if she goes back to her country

• Toronto officers face G20 discipline over name tag removal

  Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair announced that 90 officers are facing disciplinary action after it was learned that they removed their name tags during the G20 Summit weekend. They will most likely lose a day’s pay.
  On Wednesday, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair testified before the Commons public safety committee where he discussed police officers’ various controversial actions during the G20 Summit in June.

• British couple kidnapped by Somali pirates freed after ransom payment

  A British couple kidnapped from their yacht by Somali pirates more than a year ago have been freed after a ransom was paid.

  Paul and Rachel Chandler, 61 and 56, from Tunbridge Wells, were handed over by the pirates to officials in Adado, central Somalia, early this morning.

• Burma election observers report voter intimidation

• Russian journalist beaten unconscious outside office

  Two young men beat a Russian journalist unconscious outside his office today, 48 hours after another reporter was attacked with an iron bar.

• Tell the TSA: Hands Off!

• PG&E SmartMeter exec tries to infiltrate activists

  A Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executive in charge of the utility’s SmartMeter program admitted Monday that he used a fake name in an effort to join an Internet discussion group of SmartMeter opponents.

  William Devereaux, senior director of the $2.2 billion SmartMeter program, used the name “Ralph” when he sent an e-mail to the moderator of a discussion group for people trying to block deployment of the new, wireless electricity and gas meters. But his real name appeared next to his e-mail address.

• Utility Exec Busted Trying to Spy on Consumers

  Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s executive in charge of its “SmartMeter” program got caught using a fake name to try and join an Internet talk list operated by people who are fighting installation of the new meters.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The view from beneath the waves: climate change in the Solomon Islands

  The smaller outer islands in the Solomon Islands are already seeing devastating impacts of the rising sea level. The impact of climate change is already affecting the rural population of Solomon Islands, an archipelago of eight bigger islands and hundreds of small, mostly uninhabited islands.

• US oil spill inquiry chief slams BP’s ‘culture of complacency’

  BP and the other companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster were operating under a “culture of complacency” and need top-to-bottom reform, the head of the presidential investigation into the oil spill said today.

  A day after releasing preliminary findings on the causes of the fatal explosion on the Deepwater Horizon – the first of multiple inquiries – William Reilly, co-chair of the commission, was scathing about the safety regime on board the Deepwater Horizon.

• One last chance: can we save the tiger?

• US researchers fight to reclaim climate science message

  Hundreds of scientists have signed up to two new campaigns that seek to regain control of the message about climate science.

• Crude Oil Production Forecast to 2015

  With fresh data out from EIA Washington just this afternoon, and, on the heels yesterday of IEA Paris’ long-overdue admission of Peak Oil, I thought I would release a crude oil forecast. This is a production chart that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks. I use rough estimates of future world GDP, the recent mix of primary energy use with special attention paid to coal vs oil use, and then finally decline rates in global oil production. Despite these efforts, any forecast of this nature is at best general in nature. That said, the trajectory here is worth paying attention to.

Finance

• Infighting, legislative gridlock, open warfare in Congress – just what Wall Street wanted

  A ticker-tape parade along Wall Street might appear crass in this era of austerity. But the victorious Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives can expect a warm, heartfelt welcome from America’s financial elite, who watched last week’s conservative electoral landslide with quiet satisfaction.

  In the eyes of top US financiers, Barack Obama’s hammering in the midterm elections means the White House’s war on Wall Street is over. They feel, as one hedge fund manager told the president at a town hall meeting in September, like piñatas, constantly whacked with a political stick by Democrats keen to cast them as economic villains.

• Take Action! Tell Elizabeth Warren about Your Top Priorities for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

  The sweeping Wall Street reform bill that was signed into law this summer calls for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Just like other consumer regulators work to keep dangerous products off the market, the CFPB’s job is to make sure financial products and services don’t harm consumers or our economy.

• Pillage and Plunder Alert – Deficit Commission Gets Underway

  The two chairmen of the deficit commission, former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, surprised Washington Wednesday with the release of their own draft recommendations on federal debt reduction. They were supposed to issue a report December 1, after the full 18-member panel had been given a chance to vote on each item. Knowing that it would be next to impossible to achieve a high level of support on the commission for their recommendations, the raiders decided to go it alone. Their package appears to be about three-fourths cuts and one-fourth revenue raisers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Media Misreading Midterms

  For months, the problem for Democrats was correctly identified as the “enthusiasm gap”–the idea that the progressive base of the party was not excited about voting. The exit polls from Tuesday’s vote confirm that many Democratic-tending voters failed to show up. How, then, does one square this fact with the idea that Obama and Democrats were pushing policies that were considered too left-wing? If that were the case, then presumably more of those base voters would have voted to support that agenda. It is difficult to fathom how both things could be true.

• Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World

  The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production.

• John Stauber gives UNI an inside look at the public relations world

  On Nov. 8, John Stauber presented his lecture, “Toxic Sludge is Good for You,” to University of Northern Iowa students, faculty and staff.

  Stauber, an investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author, wasn’t really trying to sell the crowd on the benefits of toxic sludge. In fact, his first book, titled “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry,” explains how to promote critical thinking in the public relations profession.

  “After decades of working as a public interest activist and organizer, I realized that there existed in the United States, especially, an institution devoted to propaganda and we call that institution a profession, the public relations industry,” said Stauber.

• Amazon’s PR Disaster

  The book, essentially a guide for pedophiles, drew massive media attention and a barrage of public scorn. At first, Amazon defended the author’s free speech rights and issued a statement saying it doesn’t condone censorship…

  [...]

  Soon after, though, Amazon yielded to complaints and threats of a boycott and pulled the book entirely. Amazon’s content guidelines for authors, including prohibitions on pornography or offensive material, could have prevented the e-book from being listed on its site to begin with, but the company’s confused handling of the situation left it facing even more controversy, including questions about its commitment to quality control and whether the company did, in fact, infringe on the author’s free speech rights.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Tibet spring

  Logging on the Internet successfully at my hotel, but discovering that while Gmail, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were all easily accessible, Twitter and Facebook were not. Social media more threatening to the censors than the high gatekeepers of Western media? (And if any of my readers has advice on how to connect to Twitter from China, please e-mail me.)

• Silvio Berlusconi’s media reach

  Silvio Berlusconi’s standard response, whenever he is challenged about his media power, is to exclaim indignantly that the Italian press is as free as any in the world. That, of course, misses the point that he either controls or influences six of the seven main terrestrial channels (the sole exception being La7, owned by Telecom Italia). The effects can be seen clearly in TV coverage of the latest wave of sex scandals to wash over Italy’s prime minister. Corriere della Sera’s TV critic, Aldo Grasso, called it “a triumph of reticence”. He added: “if you followed the Italian television news bulletins, you would understand very little”.

• Google stands up for your data

  If technology had its own version of People magazine, this week’s cover story would involve pictures of Google and Facebook in opposing bubbles, looking angrily in each other’s direction.

  The battle is now over data portability. To summarize, about a week ago, Google said Facebook wasn’t allowed to come over and play anymore. That is, because Facebook wouldn’t let users take their data back out of Facebook, Google blocked them from importing the data to begin with, which they could in the past.

• Supreme Court Considers Corporate Right to Mandatory Arbitration

  The U.S. Supreme Court may continue its march towards permitting greater corporate “rights” in the case AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, scheduled for oral argument on Tuesday. If the Court sides with the telecom giant, it will greatly weaken rules regarding an individual’s right to join class-action lawsuits, one of the most powerful legal tools available to citizens and consumers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• 3D Printing May Bring Legal Challenges, Group Says

  A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a new paper says.

• How long will innovation continue in internet software?

  Monopolies and the internet are the subject of articles by kdawson at Slashdot link here and Tim Wu at the Wall Street Journal link here. They note that the monopolies are innovative, but that they will not always remain so.

  Actually, they are not real monopolies, but rather collectively they make up an oligopoly where the companies compete at the margins, mainly in the form of product differentiation, They are successful as long as they innovate. Why would they not continue to do so? On first thought, because they run out of innovations. But is that likely?

• Copyrights

  • Once Again, the Copyright/Trademark Tail Tries to Wag the Internet Dog

    Congress is set to once again consider the Sen Leahy’s Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeit Act, a truly awful bill (with the appropriately awful acronym “COICA” — which sounds a little too much to my ears like “cloaca,” and if you don’t know what “cloaca” means, you can look it up here . . .). I have written a (relatively brief) “Law Professors’ Letter in Opposition,” which now has about 35 signatories, which you can read here. [There’s a summary of the bill’s provisions in the Letter — and the full text of the current version is posted here]

    The bill would allow the Attorney General to institute an in rem action against the domain name of any Internet site “dedicated to infringing activities” — defined to include any site that “engages in” copyright or trademark-infringing activities where those activities, “taken together,” are “central to the activity” of the site. The court would then be authorized to issue injunctions — not against the offending website, but against “the domain name” itself — ordering the domain name registrar where the target site’s domain name was registered, and the domain name registry responsible for maintaining the authoritative database of names for the target site’s top-level domain, to “lock out” the domain name (and therefore prevent access to the site through use of the domain name).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2010.11.12

  Topics for this podcast:

  *Our latest CAOS Special Report – Control and Community
  *Red Hat releases RHEL 6
  *Symbian and Oracle highlight community challenges
  *The latest on government adoption of OSS from GOSCON
  *Open core issue continues, now with Linux and evil twins

Kernel Space

• What’s The Fastest Partition Scheme On Cheap Flash Media?

  You read the Fastest Flash article so you already know Ext4 can turbocharge your thumb drive. But you run Linux, so of course want even more! Is there anything else to do?

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org 7.6 Release Candidate 1 Is Finally Here

    Alan Coopersmith has announced the first release candidate of X.Org 7.6. Originally the X.Org 7.6 release was supposed to come in October, but that didn’t happen and now into November we are finally seeing the first test katamari.

Applications

• Using Rhythmbox

  I mentioned in my Fedora 14 mini-review that I’m really enjoying Rhythmbox, the default music management application for GNOME. The other day, I decided to install the MP3 libraries for Rhythmbox. This is one of those unfortunate areas, where MP3 music is not supported “out of the box” on most Linux distributions, including Fedora. That’s because MP3 is patent-encumbered, so technically Linux distributors can’t include it without paying a license.

• The Perfect Desktop – Fedora 14 i686 (GNOME)

• With NoMachine NX, NoPC Expands Revolutionary Desktop Computing Solution

• Proprietary

  • Adobe Creative Suite to Linux will be a reality soon?

• Instructionals/Technical

  • UI Application for create and verify md5, crc32 and other checksum – PySum

  • Monitoring process

  • Nautilus Extensions – Powerful Right-Click Menu to Extend Nautilus Functionality

  • Parsing Bazaar logs with PHP

  • Upload to Google Docs via Nautilus Using Nautilus-GDoc

  • 10 Great Inkscape vector tutorials | Nov-10

• Wine

  • Ignition (a racing game) Runs on Ubuntu with Wine

    Here’s another “runs on Ubuntu with Wine”. Ignition is an old racing game that is now abandonware and it runs pretty well under Wine. As it’s abandonware (the company that created it no longer exists) it’s available to download from the Internet – I should point out that abandonware is yet another legal grey area (there are so many!) so check the laws in your country etc. etc.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Introducing KDualAction: It all started because of a sunken Pause button

    The first step was to write a page on toggle buttons for KDE HIG, getting it reviewed and accepted on kde-usability mailing list.

  • The About dialog goes social – now for all of KDE!

    Remember a year ago when I blogged about the Social About dialog? The dialog in Amarok that replaces the dull old About dialog with something more colorful?

    Last Wednesday, after an almost complete rewrite and a few days of review, I committed my KDElibs port of the Social About dialog to trunk, to be released with KDE SC 4.6.

  • we are out of househacking & KDE e.V. Board Meeting in Nijmegen

    I’ve just returned from our local microbrewery, Brouwerij de Hemel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the place where I live after a nice dinner with my fellow KDE e.V. Board Member members. Friday and Saturday we had planned to hold a two+ day board meeting here in Nijmegen.

  • Hello Planet KDE && OpenSearch in Rekonq

  • Nautilus Extensions – Powerful Right-Click Menu to Extend Nautilus Functionality

  • Turning Kate into a Prolog IDE

    The thing you do most of time is consulting files and if you type it manually it can be pretty annoying. But Kate can help

• GNOME Desktop

  • Ever Wondered WTF Gnome vs Ubuntu?

    This post will either go one of two ways, either people will get more irritated or it will shed some light on why seemingly rational people keep on doing seemingly irrational things.

• Xfce

  • Xfce 4.8 GO’ing to Linux in 2011, preview out now

    GIO is a GObjects based abstraction layer of I/O. Overall, Xfce 4.8 is making extensive use of
    GObjects.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Webconverger- A Debian-based minimalistic browser-only linux operating system

  • Webconverger 7

    7.0 marks a huge milestone for the Webconverger browser only operating system, since the Debian base system has upgraded from “lenny” to “squeeze”.

• Red Hat Family

  • RHEL 6 has Nothing Noteworthy for Home Desktops

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Final shows up on 10th November 2010, almost 44 months after its previous major release (RHEL 5 was released on 14th March 2007). But at the time it came, it’s already bit obsolete for desktop use. Of course, desktop has never been a sweetpot for Red Hat. But was it really tarnishing it’s rock-stability by riding a few versions up on some packages? What was holding RH back from appropriating KDE 4.5 series, or for that matter jumping to GNOME 2.32? Sure, it must have backported some goodies from Fedora 13 and 14, but they work underneath, the worry is that it’ll put on these DEs till, say, 7 to 10 years. Moreover, KDE has undergone many improvements from its 4.3 to 4.5 versions.

• Debian Family

  • Preview: Debian 6 “Squeeze” (Part 4: Standard)

    It was a nice experience being able to have this much control over my system. Maybe this is why Arch is supposed to be so good. Stay tuned for a final[ish, but not really] report on the state of Debian-based Oxidized Trinity!

  • SimplyMEPIS Version 11 Alpha 1 (10.9.70) and antiX core

    That was the only issue that I ran into with the very first Alpha Build for the next SimplyMEPIS release. A lot of people reported a similar issue, so it is certain to get fixed in the very next Alpha Build, which will probably be available in a week or two.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • 8 Beautiful Linux/Ubuntu Wallpaper Packs You Should Take a Look

      We have featured a number of wallpaper collections here before which includes the likes of beautiful Ubuntu Maverick wallpapers, awesome Android desktop wallpapers etc. Now, here is a bunch of Linux/Ubuntu wallpaper packs among others you might like.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 10 Download Links

        The release of Linux Mint 10 has brought more traffic than we’ve ever seen before, and sadly also much more than our server is able to cope with. We’ve got dedicated servers for the website, the blog, the forums and the seeding of the torrents, and even with that, we’re not able to face the traffic!

      • How to install Linux Mint 10 on a btrfs file system

        Linux Mint 10 is the first version of Linux Mint with built-in support for the B-tree File System (btrfs). Btrfs is one of the newest file systems in the Linux kernel. It is a copy on write file system with the following features: snapshotting and writtable snapshots, object-level mirroring and stripping, file system compression, multi-device support, online and offline file system checking, etc.

      • Linux Mint 10 Reviewed

        Linux Mint is arguably the front-runner when it comes to Linux distributions that target Windows users looking to migrate to linux. Now Mint has released a new version named “Julia”. Mint claims to be a user-friendly OS that just works for the average user; its forte being elegance, ease of installation and usability. It began in 2006, based on Ubuntu, and basically follows Ubuntu except in some important areas which we will discuss after installation.

      • Linux Mint 10: A beautiful rescue distro

        This is certainly a great rescue distro: easy to use, responsive, elegant, and functional. The only flaw I found is that it does not fit a CD…which is the same case of the alpha release of SimplyMEPIS 11. Is Linux moving to Live DVDs instead of Live CDs?

Devices/Embedded

• Hacked Kinect Handles Photos, Minority Report Style

  With the open source driver for the Kinect released, it didn’t take long for some Kinect hacks to surface. Now someone out there has used the open source Kinect driver to turn the device into a gesture-based multi-touch control device, allowing it to identify gestures that can be used to manipulate photos, similar to how it’s done in the Minority Report film. Check out a video of it in action after the jump, and a clip from the Minority Report film to remind you of what we’re talking about.

• Mini PC touted for upgradeable design

  Xi3 Corporation announced a compact PC it claims will be readily upgradeable, thanks to the use of one board containing the processor and memory, along with two separate I/O boards. The Xi3 Modular Computer offers a choice of AMD processors, SSD (solid state disk) storage, 1080p video output, two eSATA ports, and an “Xm3dia” expansion port, the company says.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Volunteers Report: OLPC Samoa School Deployments

    In May 2010, XO laptops from OLPC were deployed into two primary schools in Samoa – 48 XO-1.0 laptops to Laumoli Primary School children plus additional laptops to teachers and 27 XO-1.0 laptops to Paia Primary school children plus additional laptops to teachers. These schools are located on Savaii Island.

Monitoring with Nagios: New Online Training from the Linux Magazine Academy

Help me start a FOSS Tithing movement

A tithe is a voluntary tax (often 10% of income), usually paid yearly to a religious organization. I’d like to adopt this concept for free and open source software (FOSS), which in many ways is like a religion.

Please help me start a FOSS tithing movement. I’ve set up FOSSTithe.org to keep track of company pledges and amounts donated. I also set up a Google group for discussion.

I’ll go first: DuckDuckGo hereby pledges to tithe 10% of its income to free and open source software projects. I plan to keep this up indefinitely, i.e. as long as I’m in charge.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Elementary Theme is Quite a Revelation

    We have seen other elementary based works before like Nautilus Elementary and the Elementary 2.0 GTK theme itself, but the elementary version of Firefox here quite stand apart. The latest update brings in a name change as well. From now on, it will be called as ‘eFirefox’.

  • Firefox 4, How To Undo The Changes

    I have been working with the latest builds of Firefox 4 for the last two months. The browser has changed tremendously, both interface wise but also under the hood. The interface changes will likely split the Firefox user base. This article is for users who prefer the “old” interface and way of working the web browser. It looks at each change and offers alternatives or options to undo it. That obviously depends on the change at hand, and there may be changes that cannot be undone at all.

Databases

• Firebird 2.5 is released and supports all the Debian Linux main Architectures

Oracle

• LibreOffice Logo

  The LibreOffice project has a preliminary logo. The symbol aside, I see some issues with the type. The combination of the top of the 2nd f and the dot of the i is a little unfortunate. The b and r might work for body text, but not here. Setting Libre in bold only emphasises the unfortunate proportion of the 2 words (close to, but not quite the same width).

• Apache’s Java threats aren’t new

  The Apache Software Foundation isn’t very happy with Oracle leadership of the Java Community Process. They’ve gone so far as to issue a lengthy statement saying that if certain items and conditions don’t change that they’ll leave the JCP.

Project Releases

• Lightworks will be available to download at November 29

  Today We’ve received a letter from EditShare subscription. In this letter we’ve found that Lightworks is going to be released very soon, and we want to share these good news with you.

Programming

• The Book is Out!

  After countless commits, the generosity of dozens of proofreaders, and far too long proofreading the index, Modern Perl: the book is available!

• Python 2.7.1 rc1 – released!

• Ghosts of Unix Past: a historical search for design patterns

Security

• So, just how insecure is Android really?

Defence/Police/Aggression

• CIA created ‘safe haven’ for Nazis following WWII, report finds

  New York Times obtains complete version of U.S. Justice Department report detailing the CIA’s use of Nazi émigrés for post-war intelligence purposes.

• Reporting the L’Oreal/Bettencourt affair: is it worth it?

  It was the perfect story: a mix of glitz, hairspray and celebrity family-feuding that turned into a political scandal threatening to engulf the highest reaches of the French state.

• Russian journalist ‘nearly killed’ in doorstep beating

  A leading Russian journalist has been left with a fractured skull, a shattered jaw and a broken leg after two men beat him close to death on the doorstep of his Moscow home.

  Oleg Kashin, 30, a reporter with the influential daily newspaper, Kommersant, was rushed to hospital after the unknown assailants struck him repeatedly with a blunt instrument.

• Alan Shadrake faces Singapore jail term for criticising use of death penalty

  When his head hit the pillow in his Singapore hotel room in the early hours of 18 July, Alan Shadrake must have believed his gamble had paid off.

Finance

• Ireland’s young flee abroad as economic meltdown looms

  Now he is forecasting mass mortgage defaults and an ugly popular uprising. The first stirrings are already visible, he says, with “anxiety giving way to the first upwellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will transform Irish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America”, giving rise to a new “hard-right, anti-Europe, anti-traveller party”.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Tea Party is not new, or coherent. It’s merely old whine in new bottles

  Lectures about fiscal responsibility from the occupants of a plush suite on the 20th floor of one of the fanciest hotels in Las Vegas stick in the craw like a slice of cantaloupe swallowed sideways. Appropriately, the Tea Party Express’s open bar, trays of fruit and skyline view at the Aria hotel on election night smacked more of a corporate event than a political, let alone a populist, one.

  At one stage I turned to a man standing next to me and asked if he was a Tea Party supporter. “No,” he said. “I was hoping you were.” He was a state department official who had brought some foreign journalists in the hope of meeting some real Tea Party supporters to interview. But they couldn’t find any. There is a reason for that.